In the course of friendship with Robert Rauschenberg and the circle around John Cage, Johns was inspired by Cage and worked with Rauschenberg, which was the decisive course on the way to his own artistic development.
Which unfolds an interesting bandwidth in their objectives and nuances with Jasper Johns:
Again and again flags, targets, Numbers
From 1954 the first of the flag, born in the article "Jasper Johns: born artists, live with and for art" more precisely presented flags, targets and Numbers, which should also appear again and again in his work:
- “Figure 8 ″, 1959
- "Flag", 1971
- "Target", 1958
- "Target", 1960
- "Figure 2", 1963
- "Figure Five", 1963–64
- "Target (Ulae 147)", 1974
Johns also devoted himself to numerous other motifs:
"False Start" and "Device Circle" from 1959 are also typical Jasper-Johns drawings and paintings, made with a "mechanical arm" (mostly any kind of strip of wood), with which Johns scratched the color on the screen, as was so often the case in arches, curves or circles, while the arm kept in touch with the canvas.
In 1960 the "Coat Hanger" and the "Painted Bronze" , clear excursions into the pop art , which let Rauschenberg feel on John's work.
Art as a symbol of life
The topic of the "devices" (symbols, signs, emblems) should later work out Johns with a wasteful involvement of text, until he finally reached the new topic of the "body imprints" (body prints), "an all-encompassing allegory of art as and from body":
- "Periscope (Hart Crane)", 1962
- "Diver", 1962-63
This mix of "Device" and "Body Imprint" appears from 1963, in "Periscope" Johns uses the reprint of his arm over the painted sign, the impression should arise as if the artist's arm worked as meaningful and imaging. arm has a similar figurative function, including an upgrown color and body impression .
The curator and head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art of the National Gallery of Art , Washington DC saw in this technique "the reconstruction of the figuration in modern art" - the manifestation of the mechanical process alone gives the body a new place in the artistic art.
Art as a personal life story
In "Periscope" and "Diver", Johns also processed personal shocks, on the one hand his unsightly separation from the long -standing track of Rauschenberg, on the other hand the suicide of the poet Hart Crane , whose poetry was deeply impressed by John's poet.
The poet Hart Crane, born in 1899, mentally unstable and over-sensitive, despite the Guggenheim scholarship, only financial problems and bad reviews had been dealt with through his two published books "White Buildings" (1926) and "The Bridge" (1930).
On April 27, 1932, he took his life in a spectacular manner by pushing his hands to the sky from the "SS Orziba" into the Gulf of Mexico. His body was never found.
Johns recorded the gesture with the outstretched hands in the pictures, this visual reference to Crane's suicide is supposed to express John's emotional stress on the disaster of the separation of Rauschenberg.
Stories about the art and the riddle of life
"Land's End" was also created in 1963 , another example of the fact that John's pictures tell deep and background stories, this time not on life, but to art:
René Magritte asked the basic question in the room in his "La Traume des Image" Magritte to show and prove that even the most realistic illustration with the object itself is not identical.
In a very similar manner, Johns asks in "Land's End" (and many others of his pictures in the 1960s) whether the name of a color is the same as the color itself, and maybe even more important, as anyone can know or believe that a color like red is not actually yellow, for example. Where does red stop and start yellow? Is red defined by its opposite, for example because it is not money or blue? Is red without a very own quality, just a description of relationships? Who decides that?
In contrast to Magritte, Johns does not make a decision of these questions, on the contrary, his real and great merit as an artist is to ask questions into the world. Many questions, and that should happen to the viewer when he thinks about a work of art by Johns - he should be suggested to think about many questions of our existence, which there are no safe answers.
We are in the process of being carried away by the striking waters to be carried away by our feet, we see the huge wave on the horizon, but we cannot avoid, according to Johns there is no stability, we cannot trust anything and nobody. Nothing has its own value, but only bears descriptive labels, is defined by his relationships with something else, and so everything is connected to everyone.
This is shown by Johns in “Land's End” by the letters in primary colors, which like the whole picture does not contain much color. The whole gray picture is a mix of warm and cool, brown and blue gray tones, actually an explanation of how gray interacts with color. Gray is the middle of the spectrum, a mixture of black and white, or the color that you get together when you mix in opposite colors - as the famous gray of the artist color manufacturer Gamblin Artist Colors , Torrit Gray , is mixed from all colors, the gamblin produces in its color factory. Gray can therefore be full of color, even contain the whole spectrum without us being able to recognize one of the individual colors.
In a similar way, "According to what" , 1964, several merged canvases, painted panels with different finds, created using techniques from previous work, brush markings, stencil names and prints of body parts. Here, however, Johns expanded his visual repertoire by taking elements such as the screen printing of newspaper pages that put the Kremlin at the center of the painting and discussion.
Warhol and Rauschenberg used screen printing to be able to convert photos into paintings conveniently and without reference to the artist's hand; Johns deals intensively artistically with the screen printing in order to strengthen the idea of the interweaving of artists and equipment, which he researched "Periscope"
On the extreme left side, as an ODE, he puts a small canvas with the silhouette of Ducamps on his mentor Marcel Duchamp, from which only the back with the date, title and John's signature is visible, over this canvas, a chair on the head stretches its legs into the air.
These found objects were added because Johns wanted to create a painting that "allows things to change" how the light and view of the viewer change around the work - a shift in the focus that John's' believes that we look at the world through countless different fragments, with every shift of the context from a different perspective.
Coping with life
"Racing Thought" , 1983, also in this tradition In 1983 Johns suffered from a mild form of "racing thought", he got to know the medical term and was very amused that the frenzied thoughts are a generally known syndrome.
With "Scent" , 1973-74, a fairly large format, a new era begins again, here Johns establishes the basic rules of his "hatched pictures".
Scent consists of nine plates, three canvases, each divided into three by drawn lines. The three left and three right plates are identical, as are the third and fourth, the sixth and the seventh. They can be labeled (e.g. from right to left, ABC, CDE, EFA) and re -grouped (CDE, EFA, ABC), the edges always fit together as before.
With the title SCENT (fragrance, track) Johns chose a title that both Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock already used, this is seen as a reference and/or as an ironic bow to art that became art history.
"Corpse and Mirror II" , 1974-75, is also such a hatched picture, the pattern of which John's pattern once said: I only saw it for a second, but I knew immediately that I would use it. It had all the characteristics that interest me - the approach of a letter shape, repeatability, obsessive quality, silent order and the opportunity to remain completely meaningless.
Other famous pictures in Scent manner are the tryptichons "Weeping Women" , 1975, which is supposed to refer to Picasso's nude pictures in his Cubist period 1907-1909 , and "Between the Clock and the Bed" , 1981, inspired by the "Self-Portrait Between The Clock and The Bed" , 1940-42 by Edvard Munch .
Art and art history
For "Perilous Night" , 1982, Johns was suggested by a detail of Matthias Grunewald 's "Isenheim altar" :
The soldiers, which was stretched by the brilliant light of the risen Christ in the second mural .
Without this background knowledge, "Perilous Night" is a dark and dense picture that definitely does not seem to want to voluntarily reveal its meaning to the viewer. The fact that John's pictures often refer to art history was known to the expert viewers, but even the most ingenious art critic did not come to the “Isenheim altar”, so that Johns himself revealed the reference at some point.
In “Ventriloquist” , in 1983 John's flags, number and targets arrange a symbolic self -portrait, not very easy to recognize at first glance.
The composition looks very realistic, with the crooked nail in the shade, the carefully painted willow basket and the pipelines shown in detail, on the right side. On the left side there is a lot for connoisseurs and lovers of weird art: eccentric potter of the ceramic artist George Edgar Ohr, who called himself "The Mad Potter of Biloxi" ( the crazy pottery of Biloxi "), should be a whale in the background (which is embedded in the famous 1979 Illustration of Herman Melville's Moby Artist and illustrator Barry Moser should be based).
Two American flags, one above the other and in the opposite tones of the color circle, share the sides, and the black and white picture on the right, on closer inspection, also shows a copy (a lithograph of the artist Barnett Newman, the Johns revered)-the abdominal speaker (ventriloquist) Johns has a lot to tell us.
Just like in "The Seasons (Summer)" , 1987, where little Kolibri on the branch is as difficult to make out as that of Picasso's "Minotaur Moving His House" , on which Johns are again a few ears of his own works and (in memory of Leonardo da Vinci and Marcel Duchamp ) a Mona Lisa .
What should the seahorse? Never come on it: This should conjure up the picture of the horse, which in Picasso's Minotaur picture (not very well recognizable) through a birth, some also recognize an allusion to gender stereotypes because the children perform the children at the seahorse. In 1986 autumn, winter and spring were created for the “Summer”, on which there is similarly to discover.
Art as a riddle
As in ...
- "Mirror's Edge", 1992
- "The Seasons", 1990
- "Nothing at all Richard Dadd", 1992
In the 1990s, John's pictures populated new voices and the old voices can be read in a completely new way.
"Mirror's Edge" is built on a floor plan from John's house of his childhood, "Nothing at all richard dadd" as well, this picture goes back to the English painter Richard Dadd , who murdered his father in the 19th century because ghost votes committed to him.
We do not know how it was with Jasper John's "Racing Thoughts" at the time, but Richard Dadd spent his rest of his life in a hospital for criminal mentally ill, where he wrote a long poem about his masterpiece: "The Fairy Fellers" (painting of the fairies).
The last line of this poem says that "nothing can be made out of nowhere" - because art seemed to create art out of a kind of inner necessity, in the opinion of many art historians for Johns the occasion to refer to him.
The three pictures also show some similarities, the identification of which should be left to the curious viewer. Just like the interpretation of the last two famous Johns works:
"Near the Lagoon" , 2002-03, of which the director of Art Institute of Chicago said it was the masterpiece of a completely mature artist. Who had delivered a profound work at an advanced age in which he looks back on himself and for art history - and that the Americans should finally say goodbye to the false belief that an artist's early work is always his most important.
"Fragment of a Letter" , 2009, in which Johns at the tender age of 81 shows that he is still able to invent visual shapes and representations-the hands in the letter fragment on the left speak. Decryable characters speak, an exercise for very bright heads if the right side remains covered.
Jasper John's public work: exhibition history and art in public collections
In 1954 he had found his direction, the first of the typical motifs were created that are now connected to the artist Jasper Johns: 'Targets', American flags, maps, pictures with numbers, words and letters.
In 1957 Johns Leo Castelli met, an artist banker who moved from Europe to New York from Europe in 1941 and was just about becoming the meeting point of the European and the American art scene with his gallery, which had just opened in his living room. In contrast to the established, mostly conservative galleries of his artists, Castelli was interested in the "originality" of his artists, he organized a group exhibition for Johns in the same year and in 1958 the first solo exhibition by Jasper Johns .
In addition, the art historian and founding director of the Museum of Modern Art Alfred Barr first works for exactly this MoMA, Johns produced a John-Cage Retrospective concert in the New Yorker Town Hall, the promotion began, unstoppable.
From 1958 Johns regularly exhibited at Castelli (1960, 1961 and 1963) and thus also achieved great popularity in Europe: in 1964 the first Jasper-Johns exhibition was in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London ; At the instigation of Castelli's former wife and partner Ileana Saturday, Johns was able to exhibit at the II Biennale de Paris .
Johns was at the Venice Biennale (1970, 1978, 1988) , at Documenta in Kassel (1964 Documenta 3, 1968 Documenta 4, 1972 Documenta 5, 1977 Documenta 6), worked with Samuel Beckett in Paris (1973) and created graphics and book designs for Becketts eight short-prosa pieces Fizzles (1977). He designed costumes, stage sets and posters for John Cage and Merce Cunningham and their dance company.
The flags, targets and Numbers should certainly be known to everyone who wants to be considered art staffin. If you claim deeper art formation for yourself, the rest of the works of Jasper Johns are also known. There was enough opportunity to admire them:
Jasper Johns can look back on over 150 solo exhibitions and almost 700 group exhibitions .
Most in the USA (594) and in Leo Castelli Gallery (61), but also 33 in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 24 in the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, 15 in the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles and 12 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC
68 solo exhibitions of Jasper Johns took place in Germany, 34 in Great Britain, 20 in Spain and 18 in Italy, and Jasper John's exhibition history is far from over (current exhibitions see article "Jasper Johns: born artists, live with and for art" ).
However, you don't need to wait for an exhibition, but you can see Jasper John's works in one of the many public collections:
- Denmark: Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Museet for Velvet Art / Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde
- Germany: Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen, Museum Ludwig Cologne, K20 Düsseldorf, Museum of Modern Art (MMK) and Städel Museum Frankfurt am Main, Reinking Hamburg Collection, Ludwig Museum in the Deutschherrenhaus Koblenz, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach
- Finland: Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
- France: Musee d´Art Moderne et d`art Contemporain Nice (Mamac), Nice
- Iran: Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art Tehran
- Israel: The Israel Museum Jerusalem
- Italy: Museo d'ARTE Contemporanea di Villa Croce Genoa, Centro de Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Della Spezia (CAMEC) La Spezia, Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (Mart) Rovereto
- Japan: Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Iwaki City Art Museum, Kawasaki City Museum, Yokohama Museum of Art, Nishi-Ku Yokohama, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art Tokio
- Canada: National Gallery of Canada Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada Ottawa on, Vancouver Art Gallery Vancouver BC
- Macedonia: Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje
- Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
- Norway: Henie Onstad Art Center Høvikodden
- Austria: Albertina and Museum Modern Art Foundation Ludwig (Mumok) Vienna
- Switzerland: Basel's art museum
- Hungary: Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest
- USA: Addison Gallery of American Art Andover MA, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art Charlotte NC, Berman Museum of Art Collegeville Pa, Boca Museum of Art Boca Raton Fl, Boise Art Museum Bam ID, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University CA, Columbia Museum of Art SC, Dallas Museum of Art Tx, Moines Art Center IA, FIGGE Art Museum Davenport ia, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art Norman Ok, Gibbes Museum of Art Charleston SC, Glenstone Potomac Md, Greenville County Museum of Art (GCMA) SC, Guild Hall Museum East Hampton NY, Harry Ransom Center Austin Tx, Honolulu Museum of Art Hi City Mo, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) CA, Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art Evanston Il, Marywood University Art Gallery Scranton PA, Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MfAH) TX, Middlebury College Museum of Art Vt, Milwaukee Art Museum (Mam) Wi, with List Visual Arts Center Cambridge Ma, Moca Grand Avenue Los Angeles CA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) IL, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (Moca) FL, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (McASD) La Jolla Ca, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York Ny, Nasher Sculpture Center Dallas TX, National Academy Museum New York Ny, Palm Springs Art Museum Ca, Philadelphia Museum of Art Pa, Polk Museum of Art Lakeland Fl, Pomona College Museum of Art Claremont CA, Princeton University Art Museum NJ, Reynolda House Museum of American Art Winston-Salem NC, Saint Louis Museum of Art (Sluma) Mon, Samek, Samek Art Museum Lewisburg Pa, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) CA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Ca, Museum of Art Savannah (SCAD) GA, Seattle Art Museum WA, Tarble Arts Center Charleston Il, The Allen Memorial Art Museum Oberlin Oh, The Art Institute of Chicago Il, The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky Lexington Ky, The Baltimore Museum of Art Md, The Cleveland Museum of Art Oh, The Detroit Institute of Arts Mi, The McNay Art Museum San Antonio Tx, The Menil Collection Houston Tx, The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York Ny, The National Gallery of Art Washingen DC, The Phillips Collection Washington DC, The Rose Art Museum Waltham Ma, Tucson Museum of Art Az, The University of Arizona Museum of Art (Uama) Tucson Az, Utah Museum of Fine Arts Salt Lake City Ut, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Richmond VA, Walker Art Center Minneapolis Mn, Whitney Museum Art New York Ny, Yale University Art Gallery New Haven CT
The list of public collections in the United States is long - and deliberately fully reproduced: A European -interested European who is traveling to the United States has to view Jasper Johns live and on site, because Jasper Johns is a very illustrious group.
Among the 100 best known and most successful artists in the world are just two dozen US artists from 1900 to 1950. These are the artists who founded modern art in the USA, and Jasper Johns belongs to the first dozen of these artists.
Finally, some motivation for more common museum visit : In the museums of the European countries and the USA, this is gathered, which is considered the "art history of the world" for the western world (the science of art history was developed in Germany).
We Germans should probably hurry more than everyone else to understand and "hook up" this art history of the western world in their basic features. Because we are in the privileged situation to include many people in our society who can convey a picture of large parts of art history outside the western world and will also be happy to do so if we ask them ...
